Date of Award

May 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

William Bristow

Committee Members

Julius Sensat, Stan Husi

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a reading concerning Kant's concept of freedom and its relation to morality. In Groundwork III, Kant deduces morality from freedom, such strategy in which requires a metaphysical understanding of freedom. However, according to Kant's argument in the first Critique, we do not have knowledge of freedom as an idea of reason. That is: we cannot know that we are free. In the second Critique, Kant clams that morality is a "fact of reason", which is not dependent on any antecedent data. We could cognize that we are free when we are conscious of the moral law. In this paper, I do some preliminary work regarding this argumentative shift in Kant's moral philosophy. I reconstruct Kant's arguments in the Groundwork III and the second Critique to show that freedom as an idea of reason gains its reality from a practical standpoint view.

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